


All the wrong ways

by Yidhra



Series: The air outside the cage (tastes sweeter) [1]
Category: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Impa and Purah are Zelda's cool aunts, Zelda isn't perfect guys, a bit sad maybe, and a liiitle bit mysoginistic?????, don't worry tho he'll learn soon-ish, i managed not to write a single swear word in this, i'm proud of myself, king rhoam is implied to be emotionally abusive???, no canon we die like men, she makes mistakes, which says a lot about my other fics, zelda centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 14:35:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17510444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yidhra/pseuds/Yidhra
Summary: "When she was thirteen, she met her appointed knight, and she resented him with all of her heart. Because he was all of the things a hero should be, and so everyone expected her to be everything a princess should be.Princess Zelda worked to be all of these things, she forced herself to be pretty, kind and intelligent. But it seemed that she was all of those things in a wrong way.She settled inside the Sheikah armour like the last piece of a mechanism falling into place, and for the first time since she was six, she felt like she was everything she should be."In which Zelda decides to do things her way, and leaves her father's cage behind,or...Nintendo can pry Sheik from my cold dead hands.





	All the wrong ways

**Author's Note:**

> Alrighty, I finally have the game and it gave me feels, so I'm hoping to get rid of them by dumping them here.
> 
> Also my proof reading, as always, leaves much to be desired. So, yeah...

It started when she was six and her father still told her stories before bed. There was always a valiant hero and a beautiful princess, and his eyes smiled when he spoke of her. He always described her to be like Zelda, the princess was always pretty, always intelligent and kind. But she was never strong, or clever, or undaunted.  

Zelda never understood why the princess couldn’t fight, why she couldn’t save herself from the bad guys, and when she said things like ‘I would do this’ or ‘she could escape like this’, her father always frowned, answering, ‘she doesn’t have to, because that's what the hero is for’.  

 _That’s_ _what_ _the_ _hero_ _is_ _for_.  

This bothered her, though she never voiced her thoughts further, seeing as the strict countenance of the king had returned. It always seemed like he was two different people; there was King Rhoam, and then there was her father. Her father had started to show less and less of his face ever since her mother died.  

However, daydreaming was something nobody could take from her. In the stories she told herself, the princess was strong and fearless, and no evil could contain her.  

  

  

   
 

* * *

 

  

  

  

When she was thirteen, she met her appointed knight, and she resented him with all of her heart. Because he was all of the things a hero should be, and so everyone expected her to be everything a princess should be.  

Princess Zelda worked to be all of these things, she forced herself to be pretty, kind and intelligent. But it seemed that she was all of those things in a wrong way.   

She was pretty in the way the sun beaming through dense foliage is pretty, in the way flowers that grow between the cracks of the stone pavement are pretty. However, as she discovered later, she was supposed to be a pretty of a different kind. Princesses are supposed to be pretty the way the moon shines at night is pretty; serene, cold and distant. They are supposed to be pretty the way flowers grow in the royal garden; controlled, delicate and  _tame_.  

She was kind the way a mother is kind to her children, and she loved all of the people in Hyrule as if they were hers. Later, she learnt that a princess must be kind in a silent way, in a passive way. She is supposed to smile with kindness, not to  _act_  kindly (“Jumping off of your horse to offer it to an old woman in the road is  _not_  the way a princess behaves!”).  

She was intelligent and devoured every new information like a starving man satiating his hunger, like the desert drank the rain without leaving a trace of it. The Sheikah artefacts and ruins awoke in her an endless need of knowing  _more_ , learning  _more_ , until they held no more secrets. And yet, once again she was wrong, wrong, wrong. A princess is supposed to be intelligent in a way that charms the nobles around her, not in the way she was; leaving them feeling dumb when they couldn’t keep up with her knowledge.  

So, Zelda was all of the things a princess should be, in a wrong way.  

In contrast, her knight was all the things a hero should be in the best way possible, making her flaws and shortcomings even more apparent. Zelda might have been kind, but she hated him nonetheless.

  

  

   
 

* * *

 

  

  

  

She was fourteen when she met Impa. She had escaped the stifling presence of King Rhoam - not her father, just King Rhoam - to examine the guardians closer. She knew she was doing something wrong, and her heart beat at the fast pace of a small bird’s, but her curiosity had gotten the best of her and the castle felt like a cage more than ever.   

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she woke up unable to move, and the walls started closing in until they crushed her. Then she was able to move again and the walls seemed as if they had never moved, but she still couldn’t breathe and taking huge gulps of air didn’t seem to work.  

Tonight had been one of those nights, and she needed to get out, to breathe the cold air of the night, not the stale one inside her tower. Impa was there when she arrived, she was holding a lantern out – with an air of resignation – for another Sheikah, a researcher that Zelda had seen before, but whose name she didn’t remember. 

(Later, she would learn that it was Purah. She had stayed late in the night studying the odd machinery, and Impa had resigned herself to accompany her older sister.) 

The two women acted nothing like she had expected. Not being treated like a princess was a new experience, and Zelda soon found that she liked it. It made her feel, in a way, less heavy. It was hard to explain, but it made it easier to breathe, and that’s all that mattered.  

  

  

   
 

* * *

 

  

  

  

“I want you to train me.”  

Zelda was still fourteen when she decided that if she was wrong in all the things a princess was supposed to be, then she wasn’t meant to be a princess at all. Impa did not refuse, or even seem surprised at all, she just gave her a knowing smile and a nod of the head, and that was that.  

Impa taught her to be strong the way water erodes the stone bit by bit, in the way the slow beat of the waves of the ocean shape the rocks to be smooth over time. She taught her to be strong in the patient way a river carves the land. And finally, she taught her to be strong the way storms are; fast and ruthless, leaving nothing in their wake.  

Impa taught her to be clever in a silent way; the way a shadow moves unnoticed, the way a leaf twists and runs through the forest riding an invisible breeze, the way wolves over time changed their furs to be unnoticed (‘’The Sheikah are wolves, we walk in silence and our pack moves as one, and by the time you hear the howling, you’re already gone”).  

Impa taught her to be undaunted the way cornered animals are; vicious, when the only way out is through the neck of a threat. She taught her to be undaunted the fierce way a bear protects their cubs, with a determination borne not out of courage, but the fear of death, of what failure might mean. She taught her to be undaunted like a soldier fighting until the last breath.  

Zelda learnt to be all the things a hero should be. And yet, just as she had been all the things a princess should be in the wrong way, she was a hero in all the wrong ways too.  

In short, she became a hero in all the ways her knight was not, and she couldn't find it in herself to be bothered by it.  

  

  

   
 

* * *

 

  

  

  

There were two major things that pushed her to leave when she was sixteen. The first one was that she had finally understood that there were roles outside of those her father had talked about in his bedtime stories. The second was Ganon.  

The looming threat of the ancient evil foretold in legends made the king even more strict and demanding, meeting all her perceived shortcomings with frustration and poorly concealed disappointment. In his eyes, she never did enough, she was never good enough. She was never enough.  

If she had still been a princess, she would have been wrecked by this. By the guilt of being unable to protect her kingdom in the way she was supposed to. However, Zelda hadn’t been a princess in a long time, and when she left Hyrule castle in the dead of the night, she did not feel guilt, only determination.  

(Zelda was undaunted, in the way cornered animals are.)  

That night – far from the asphyxiating walls of her room, far from the cage the king had crafted for her and far from the looming shadow of her knight – she bleached her long hair until it was white, cut the damaged parts and bathed afterwards in Lake Hylia. As she swam in a lazy curve, paying attention only to the sound of the water and her easy breathing, Zelda finally shed the mask she had kept all of these years, and left the princess behind. When she finally came out of the water, she found that her new mask, a piece of clothing that came with her Sheikah armour, suited her even better.  

The feeling of anonymity it gave her tasted sweetly, like freedom.  

She settled inside the Sheikah armour like the last piece of a mechanism falling into place, and for the first time since she was six, she felt like she was everything she should be. It felt  _right_.  

  

  

   
 

* * *

 

  

  

  

An anonymous traveller needs no name, and so she didn’t pick one. People referred to her merely as Sheikah, and she never bothered correcting those who mistook her for a young man. The stoic and mysterious image the Sheikah had cultivated made other travellers treat her respectfully, and kept them from prying further when she gave vague answers to their curious questions. She was grateful to Impa, more than ever, for having gifted her this armour. The woman must have known even back then, when Zelda had just turned fifteen, that this would happen someday.  

For months, Zelda travelled the lands, investigating shrines and old technology and sharing her findings with Purah, with whom she had kept correspondence. Purah never addressed her letters to Zelda, preferring to call her Sheik, an in-joke that made Zelda feel giddy inside. In her rare visits to Kakariko village, or the times when Impa happened to be at the Hateno lab, the Sheikah woman never gave any hints of knowing who she was; the secret way her eyes crinkled when she thought no one was looking said otherwise.  

As her research of Sheikah technology advanced, the search for princess Zelda that King Rhoam had ordered stalled. Nobody had seen the princess anywhere. Nobody knew what could have happened.  

The theories were abundant; somebody had kidnapped the princess (the Yiga clan was a prime suspect, and they never bothered denying it), somebody had killed the princess, Ganon had finally returned in secret and his first action was to make the princess disappear because she was a threat, the goddesses had taken away the princess because they thought Hyrule didn’t deserve being saved...  

There was but one constant, the appointed knight had not been able to save her. The people, feeling powerless, turned their frustration towards him. Finally, he was exiled from the castle and striped of his sword and his title, only permitted to return once he found the princess and brought her back.   

Zelda, for all that she had loathed him, felt the guilt gnawing at her insides with insistence. He had never been at fault for the impossible standards that the king expected of her, even if he had unknowingly made everything worse. However, she could not stop the scorn of the people unless she showed herself, and she needed her freedom. Both because once she had tasted it, she could not let it go, and because if she went back to her golden cage, she wouldn't be able to help her people as much as she could as ‘Sheik’.  

She also didn’t know him enough to know whether he would turn her in or help her out, once he knew the truth. The only thing she could do was to share her concerns with Purah, who assured her that he would always find a helping hand in the Sheikah tribe.  

She received updates from Purah often, after that, about the knight turned vagrant that wouldn’t give up in his search for the princess. And although it made her feel even more contrite to hear this, his resolve also inspired her to push her limits and work even harder. Because if he could keep looking for her, and he thought that there was still hope in his search, who was she to give up? She owed him the best of her efforts.  

  

  

   
 

* * *

 

  

  

  

She was still sixteen when the Sheikah found them; the divine beasts, and this made her reconsider everything she had known since she was six. 

If the divine beasts were real, did that mean that the roles of 'princess' and 'hero' must have beeen real too? Did this mean that she had condemned Hyrule by rejecting her role? By being a princess in a wrong way?

The mechanic eyes of what she had learnt to be Vah Rudania gave no answers, and seemed to judge her worth just like her father had, finding her lacking.

  

  

   
 

* * *

 

  

  

  

She was torn. The divine beasts existed, and so did the darkness-sealing sword (she saw it often strapped to her appointed knight’s back but she had thought it to be a replica), but her supposed divine powers had never manifested. This might have been because they didn’t exist and they were a metaphor for something else, or because everything about her was wrong, wrong, wrong.  

For the first time in months, the Sheikah armour had stopped feeling like a second skin and more like a mistake.

  

  

   
 

* * *

 

  

  

  

She sought out the knight, expecting anger, and instead she got a gentle smile that clashed bizarrely with his sunken face. The knight resembled a vagabond more than a traveller, and scars spread over his skin and under his clothes like a spider-web. The world had not been kind to him ever since he left the castle and, though she knew this was the case, she could have never imagined to which extent it was true.

Despite everything, when she stood in front of him and revealed herself, all he said – signed – was, “ _I am_ _glad_ _to_ _see_ _you_ _safe_.”  

Zelda broke down in tears, not shielded anymore by her Sheikah mask and the anonymity it brought. She apologized again and again as the knight tried to comfort her as best as he could, signing frantically with worry etched all over his face.  

Link – after three years she finally learnt his name – turned out to be pretty, kind and intelligent, something that she found very amusing in an ironic sort of way.  

He was – under all the filth of the road – pretty, the way trees are pretty under sunlight, when their leaves seen from underneath seem to shine green with their own light. He was pretty the way the stone pavement cracks on purpose to let life grow in between.  

He was kind, the way a father silently watches his children grow and learn, smiling with pride. He was kind, and acted like it, despite the hatred of the very people he was trying to protect and save.  

He was intelligent, absorbing every piece of information Zelda shared with him, keeping up with her where the nobles back at the castle couldn’t. He listened, and learnt, and  _understood_.  

Link turned out to be everything a princess should be, in a wrong way, and she found herself loving him for it. She loved him the way wolves – she thinks – must love their pack; fiercely, protectively.  

(‘’The Sheikah are wolves,” Impa had told her once, and wasn’t Zelda more Sheikah than Hylian by now?)  

She decided that he was her responsibility, even if he still felt like his duty was to be her protector. She would watch his back, like he watched hers. 

Over the next month, a Sheikah and a vagrant travelled tohether,and nobody seemed keen on asking questions to such a rare pair.  

**Author's Note:**

> Can be read as standalone, but I do intend to write more for this AU so expect a continuation some day. Soon-ish...


End file.
